Review: 'Orfeo' by Richard Powers

January 09, 2014|By Troy Jollimore

"Orfeo" by Richard Powers is about a retired professor who tries to evade the scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security. (W. W. Norton & Company)

Richard Powers' new novel, "Orfeo," begins with the death of a dog: Fidelio, a 14-year-old golden retriever. The dog's owner, the composer and retired academic Peter Els, makes the mistake of dialing 911; some time later — too late for Fidelio — two officers show up at his door. This might and ought to have been no big deal, except that the officers can't help but notice some rather disturbing items of lab equipment — not the sort of thing a retired adjunct professor of music would be expected to have hanging around the home.

Els, it turns out, is part of the burgeoning DIY biotech movement; he has been experimenting with creating new life forms in the privacy of his home kitchen.

This isn't the sort of hobby on which American law enforcement tends to look kindly. In short order, Els' laboratory, and Els himself, are designated as threats by the Department of Homeland Security. Worse, when a hospital infection in Alabama causes several deaths, the frightened public puts two and two together and comes up with a conspiracy theory: Someone — some terrorist — must be to blame.

Either someone had accidentally contaminated a batch, or America was under siege again. In normal times, most people could figure the odds. But the times would never be normal again.

In many ways, then, "Orfeo" reads like a post-9/11 update of such films as "The Fugitive" or "The Wrong Man." But it is considerably more than that. For as Els takes to the road to evade his pursuers, his life leading up to this point is conveyed in a series of narrative flashbacks, allowing Powers both to explore Els' personal life as a (largely failed) lover, husband and father, and — through the lens of Els' professional life as a composer — to engage in a series of reflections on the history of 20th-century music and the complex relations among politics, science and art.

Els became a composer at a time when music, if not Western art and culture in general, seemed to many to have hit a dead end. The avant-garde's preferred solution was for music to abandon its pretensions to beauty and pleasure and to become a vehicle for radical politics, a form of art that would subvert rather than support the established order. Avant-garde composers, that is, wanted to "weaponize" music. Traditional conceptions of melody and harmony were tossed aside: the harsher the music, the uglier, the more likely it might be to wake people up.

Much oftwentieth century musichad been lost to the idea that the diatonic scale was arbitrary and exhausted, part of the bankrupt narrative that had led to two world wars. Nothing mattered but finding a new language.

Els cannot wholly accept this view, but he cannot entirely reject it either. He spends his career in obscurity, writing the kind of crowd-displeasing music where there are "more people onstage than in the audience."

This takes a predictable toll on Els' domestic life, as does his relationship with Richard Bonner, the sometime best friend, sometime nemesis who serves as his main artistic provocateur and collaborator — when they are on speaking terms, that is. As a result of these tensions, Els ends up largely estranged from his wife and daughter — a situation he tries movingly to rectify after the discovery of his lab, when his world is collapsing around him.

Powers, whose 2006 novel "The Echo Maker" won the National Book Award, is trained in both science and music, and "Orfeo" is not the first of his novels to examine their complex interactions. "The Gold Bug Variations" (1991) is its most obvious predecessor. "Orfeo" is tighter and more streamlined than "The Gold Bug Variations," but at its core it is equally ambitious, and it is perhaps ultimately more resonant.

Powers is the uncommon author who can write a novel of ideas in which the ideas do not compete with but rather enhance the emotional urgency of the proceedings. And "Orfeo" benefits from the deep sympathy Powers seems to feel for the brilliant and troubled protagonist he has created.

This makes sense, given that Powers' own chosen art form has also been frequently accused of depletion and exhaustion. Prophesies regarding the death of the novel tend to recur with dull regularity. "Orfeo," though, establishes beyond any doubt that the novel is very much alive. Throughout the book the reader can sense Powers being pulled in two directions by the same impulses with which Els struggles throughout his life: the urge to make it new, the desire that it be beautiful. "Orfeo" is both; it's a work of which Els himself might well have been proud.

Troy Jollimore is a 2013 Guggenheim fellow and a philosophy professor at California State University, Chico. His books include "Love's Vision" and "At Lake Scugog: Poems."